June 2007 Reports (see ReportingSchedule)
FROZEN
This report is now frozen for submission to the board. Not additional editing will be reflected in the report!
Thanks to everyone who contributed
These reports are due to the Incubator PMC by '13 June 2007
ODE
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
Apache ODE is an implementation of the BPEL4WS and WS-BPEL specifications for web services orchestration. ODE entered incubation in March 2006.
Beside regular development, the principal improvement in ODE for these 3 past months is our first incubator release. We've been able to come up with a valid release after several release candidates reviewed by the ODE committers and got voted by the IPMC. We've also received a very nice contribution from Kelly Thompson for our website with good looking graphics.
A steady stream of patches is also coming in (see [1], [2] and [3] for example) and we have a few leads to bring in more committers (Tammo Van Lessen and Jim Alateras) after a couple more patch contributions.
We've raised some concerns about the absence of a real PPMC for ODE to the IPMC, result of the lack of activity of some of our mentors. We'd been handling all decisions as a community with all active committers before but our PPMC didn't reflect it. As a result, Niclas Hedhman has volunteered to become a mentor for ODE, Dims and Paul being both active mentors and the PPMC is elected now. We're ready to move on.
As a community, once the PPMC issue settles down, we believe we're ready for graduation.
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ODE-142
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ODE-139
[3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ODE-140
iPMC questions / comments:
OpenEJB
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
OpenEJB is an open source, modular, configurable, and extendable EJB Container System and EJB Server.
Incubating since: 2006-07-10
We received some very excellent feedback we are all really proud of from a new face in the community. OpenEJB has always prided itself for being the kinder, gentler side of open source and it's really good to know this is coming through.
Recent New Contributors: Karan Malhi and Raj Saini contributed their first patches.
iPMC questions / comments:
wrowe asks; what are the obstacles/next steps towards graduation? I didn't see any hint from this report.
log4net
iPMC Reviewers:
log4net is an implementation of the Apache log4j for the .NET Framework.
Incubating since: 2004-01-15
iPMC questions / comments:
- jukka: Report missing
- robertburrelldonkin: Report missing - should ask logging PMC
- mvdb: log4net had a graduation vote, but no result (at least afai could find) and no status file update.
Wicket
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
Web development framework focusing on pure OO coding, making the creation of new components very easy. Wicket entered the incubator in October 2006.
Top two items to resolve
- Graduate
- Release Apache Wicket 1.3.0 final
Community aspects:
- Community is very active and participating on wicket-dev@
- Community building effort on wicket-user
- Voted Martijn Dashorst to become Chair after graduation
- Voted Jean-Baptiste Quenot to become PPMC member
- Community had a positive graduation vote
- Had a blast at ApacheCon, integrated, mingled and socialized with the Apache community
Code aspects:
- Released Wicket 1.3.0-beta1-incubating
- Started process for finalizing 1.3.0: feature freeze, plans for release candidates
- Development on Wicket 2.0 has been discontinued after a community vote. The benefits of this version did not outweigh the burden of maintaining 2 code bases, and the API breakage would create a rift in the community.
- Adopted wicket-velocity integration sub project into Wicket
Licensing:
- Licensing issues have been resolved
- Acquired ICLA for component/code contributions for James McLaughlin.
- Wicket Velocity has been checked out and found to be issue free (license wise)
Infrastructure:
- Caught a couple of spammers on the confluence Wiki
- gmail keeps being a pest for moderation of Wicket's lists
iPMC questions / comments:
- robertburrelldonkin - hopefully this will be Wicket's last Incubator report
River
iPMC Reviewers: robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
River is aimed at the development and advancement of the Jini technology core infrastructure. River entered incubation on Dec 26, 2006.
The River community is starting some real work. The initial code submission for the Jini Technology Starter Kit (JTSK) and the ServiceUI API have been filed at the ASF secretary, voted in and landed in SVN, the committers account are in place and the PPMC is set up. No more excuses, now it's time for coding & community!
The discussion is now moving to technical issues and code evolution, which is a very good sign. There has been a discussion about package naming, as the code in SVN is under a non org.apache.* namespace:
given the sheer amount of issues with backward compatibility and supporting existing users, there has been a general consensus on getting our feet wet with the current code base, integrate a few patches that have been held off while the code was to be migrated to the ASF infrastructure, and devise a roadmap ( possibly with assistance from general/pmc@IAO) for migration to the ASF namespace:
this is high priority and the community realizes how it might be important to have a decision as soon as possible, even more if River is to publish incubating releases.
iPMC questions / comments:
Tika
iPMC Reviewers: robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries. Tika entered incubation on March 22nd, 2007.
Community
The Tika mailing lists have been relatively quiet lately, probably because with little code we don't yet have many concrete issues to talk about.
Development
We saw the first piece of Tika code when Chris A. Mattmann ported the Nutch metadata framework to Tika. Rida Benjelloun has created a version of the Lius codebase to be included in Tika, and the code is currently in the issue tracker.
Issues before graduation
The Tika project is still at an early stage of incubation. We need to continue bringing in the initial codebases and probably target for an initial incubating release later this year. We also need to work on growing the community and figuring out how to best interact with external parser projects.
iPMC questions / comments:
- robertburrelldonkin - tika is at a very early stage of development and incubator
RCF
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
RCF is a rich component set for JSF. The SVN, mailing lists are set up. JIRA needs to be set up. Also three committers, that are part of the RCF team don't have an Apache account yet. We are waiting for an import of a current code drop into the repository.
Incubating since: May 2007
iPMC questions / comments:
- robertburrelldonkin - no code drop as yet
- mvdb - code drop is being worked on, but takes time.
Yoko
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
The Yoko project is a robust and high performance CORBA server which is usable from inside any JVM.
Incubating since: 2006-01-31
Since our last report, the majority of the development work in Yoko has focused on:
- Adding new type support to the binding runtime.
- Improving performance of the runtime binding in terms of marshaling and
unmarshaling data. - Adding new type support to the IDLToWSDL and WSDLToIDL tools.
- Fixing minor issues in the ORB core code.
- Started development of an IDL preprocessor for the tools module.
- Prepared and completed a Milestone 2 release
Yoko has also become a key component of the soon to ship Geronimo 2.0 release, which has just passed certification tests.
Future plans:
We are currently working to stabilize and finalize type support in the binding runtime and tools in preparation for a release which would like to put out shortly.
We are also planning to improving the documentation for Yoko, with the goal of provide more in depth information to users of the Yoko project and to assist any future committers in understanding the existing code and functionality.
iPMC questions / comments:
- jukka: issues/steps before graduation?
Heraldry
iPMC Reviewers: robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
The Heraldry podling has been terminated by consensus of the remaining committers and by vote by the Incubator PMC. Essentially, the community was never able to reboot after the earlier breakdown. The committers are currently discussing what code will be forked to RubyForge, Google Code or other repositories. All in all, the decision to terminate was not controversial and came from the committers themselves. The mentors and PMC will finalize the closure of the project resources within the next month.
TripleSoup
iPMC Reviewers: robertburrelldonkin, mvdb
TripleSoup is the simplest thing that you can do to turn your apache web server into a SPARQL endpoint.
Nothing to report that requires IPMC or board attention at this time.
There has been very little progress on TripleSoup since the last report. All immediately relevant process/infrastructure/legal stuff has been taken care of, and now we have to dive into the technical core, which hasn't happened yet.